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In my other novel in progress, the protagonist dies at the beginning of the story but sticks around afterward to narrate.

(Themes of this book include mother-daughter love & struggle; sisterly love & struggle; forgiveness; alternative subculture; being “in the closet” financially; green burial; composting.)

The protagonist has a song playlist that serves her as a memory catalog of her adoloscent years 11-17. It’s actually IRL my playlist, which serves me in that way. Songs that were popular on the radio during those times. It even helps me clarify between if something happened in the fall, summer, winter, or spring of the given year.

Note, it’s not perfect; my memory at some points is foggy. It’s a huge asset though, and it brings me joy to be able to call up old feelings and smells/atmospheres of rooms, and just how certain times felt.

How about any of you? Do you do this too? Or have something similar?

I actually used to have this playlist on Spotify, but it disappeared the way things do sometimes when your old laptop dies and you go for awhile without getting a new (used) one and can’t necessarily access old apps / accounts once you try again.

Anyway, here is the playlist.

new paste

In my other novel in progress, the protagonist dies at the beginning of the story but sticks around afterward to narrate.

(Themes of this book include mother-daughter love & struggle; forgiveness; alternative subculture; being “in the closet” financially; green burial; composting.)

The protagonist has a song playlist that serves her as a memory catalog of her adoloscent years 11-17. It’s actually IRL my playlist, which serves me in that way. Songs that were popular on the radio during those times. It even helps me clarify between if something happened in the fall, summer, winter, or spring of the given year.

Note, it’s not perfect; my memory at some points is foggy. It’s a huge asset though, and it brings me joy to be able to call up old feelings and smells/atmospheres of rooms, and just how certain times felt.

How about any of you? Do you do this too? Or have something similar?

I actually used to have this playlist on Spotify, but it disappeared the way things do sometimes when your old laptop dies and you go for awhile without getting a new (used) one and can’t necessarily access old apps / accounts once you try again.

Anyway, here is the playlist.

11-17 playlist

Horse with no name – America
Ventura Highway – America
We May Never Pass This Way Again – Seals & Crofts
Me and Mrs. Jones – Billy Paul
Midnight at the Oasis – Maria Muldaur
Rollin Me Down the Highway – Jim Croce
Summer Breeze – Seals & Crofts
Jazzman – Carole King
It’s too late – Carole King
I Saw the Light – Todd Rundgren and Carole King
Hello it’s me – Todd Rundgren
Brandi you’re a fine girl – Looking Glass
Time in a bottle – Jim Croce
Fly Robin Fly – Silver Convention
TSOP – MFSB
Corazon – Carole King
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do – Partridge Family
My Maria – BW Stevenson
Saturday in the Park – Chicago
I’ve Been Searching So Long – Chicago
My Sweet Lord – George Harrison
What Is Life? – George Harrison

Don’t let the Sun go down on me – Elton John
It’s too late to turn back now – Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose
My love – Paul McCartney and wings
Pillow talk – Sylvia
Saturday in the Park – Chicago
Just You ‘N Me – Chicago
Sunshine of my life – Stevie Wonder
Don’t worry about a thing – Stevie Wonder
Ain’t no woman like the one I’ve got – four tops
Until you come back to me – Aretha Franklin
Listen what the Man Said – Paul McCartney & Wings
Kodachrome – Paul Simon
Band on the run – Paul McCartney
Jet – Paul McCartney & Wings
Fire and Rain – James Taylor
Don’t Rock the Boat – Hues Corporation
Brandy – Looking Glass

Philadelphia freedom – Elton John
Changes – David Bowie
Mandy – Barry Manilow
Fight the power – Isley brothers
Pick up the pieces – Average White Band
Living for the city – Stevie Wonder
Black water – Doobie Brothers
Let it ride – bachman-turner overdrive
School’s out – Alice Cooper
Shinin Star – Earth Wind & Fire

Midnight blue – Melissa Manchester
Take me in your arms (Rock me) – Doobie Brothers
My Love is alive – Gary Wright
Someone saved my life tonight – Elton John

Year of the Cat – Al Stewart

I’ll be good to you – Brothers Johnson
Got to get you into my life – Beatles
Moonlight Feels Right – Starbuck
Love will keep us together – Captain and Tennille
More, more, more – Andrea True Connection
Tear the roof off the – Parliament
Uncle Albert – Paul McCartney and Wings
Let em in – Paul McCartney and Wings
Shower the people – James Taylor
Hypnotized – Bob Welch
You’ll Never Find – Lou Rawls
Young hearts run free – Cady Stanton

Lido Shuffle – Boz Scaggs
I Wish – Stevie Wonder
Still the One – Orleans
Teacher – Jethro Tull
Dazz – Brick
Tonight’s the Night – Rod Stewart
Games People Play – The Spinners
Laughter in the Rain – Neil Sedaka
Magic man – Heart
Song on the Radio – Al Stewart
After the Loving – Englebert Humpledinck
I Wouldn’t Want To be like you – Alan Parsons Project

She’s Gone – Hall & Oates
Love will find a way – Pablo Cruz
I’m in You – Peter Frampton
Easy – Commodores

You make loving fun – Fleetwood Mac
Lucky Man – Emerson Lake & Palmer
Always and Forever – Heat Wave
Groove Line – Heat Wave
Disco Inferno – Trammps
My Baby – Paul McCartney & Wings
I Just Wanna Stop – Gino Vanelli
Ffun – ConFunkShun
You’re in My Heart – Rod Stewart
Sometimes When We Touch – Dan Hill
How Deep Is Your Love – Bee Gees
Ain’t No Stopping Us Now – McFadden & Whitehead
Roundabout – Yes

Reminiscing – Little River Band
Fool if you think it’s over – Chris Rhea
Knowing me, knowing you – Abba
Looks Like We Made It – Barry Manilow
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow – Fleetwood Mac
Two Tickets to Paradise – Eddie Money
Dark Star – Crosby Stills & Nash
On and on – Stephen Bishop
Copacabana – Barry Manilow
Mama Can’t Buy You Love – Elton John

Bye Bye Love – The Cars
Loving, Touching, Squeezing – Journey
Isn’t it time – The Babys
Shake Your Groove Thing – Peaches & Herb
Pop Muzik – M
Money – Flying Lizards
52 Girls – B-52s
Knock on Wood – Amii Stewart
Gone, Gone, Gone – Bad Company
Promises – Eric Clapton
On the Radio – Donna Summer
Fool in the Rain – Led Zeppelin
Escape (The Pina Colada Song) – Rupert Holmes

White lies – Nils Lofgren
Steal away – Nils Lofgren
Ah! Leah! – Donnie Iris
Getting in Tune – The Who
Steal Away – Robbie Dupree
Hold on Loose – 38 Special

But I’m not here to be unkind either.

I’m here to critique destructive social norms, institutions, things we have stopped questioning but need to question, things we never questioned in the first place but just accepted as they rolled in with their promises of ease and convenience.

Single-use plastic, disposable diapers, a million different detergents and cleaning products, leaf blowers, violently cheap clothing, online cheap everything, chopping down trees to widen roads, thinking it’s not only OK but good to live on a suburban half acre and spend your life mowing it and not be able to walk anywhere, constantly going on cruises and traveling to Europe but not knowing your own local area (beyond the major arterials and big-box stores) or meeting your neighbors. … The list goes on.

Don’t beat yourself up about it — question it!

Our daily (Global North) lives are incredibly destructive to the planet, and they don’t have to be.

I’m not here to make you feel bad; I’m here to get you thinking about what might not be necessary.

If you ever feel attacked or insulted by anything I write or say, always remember that the core of my message is that we have a self-interest in breaking the chains of consumerism.

We forget that convenience doesn’t necessarily bring joy.

We forget that choosing to do without some things can be incredibly liberating and allow much more joy and beauty into our lives.

In my work as a climate communicator, I constantly find myself navigating the tricky terrain between legitimately calling out harmful patterns, vs causing unnecessary hurt. There are times when I reread some thing I’ve written, and I have to revise it because I realize that I have been unnecessarily harsh.

The work we are doing is not a game. We’re either going to get our act together, or we’re not going to get to live on this planet. At the same time, if I say things in such a manner that it causes so much hurt that people can’t even take it in, my efforts will backfire.

I always welcome your questions and comments on anything I write or say. I appreciate the people who have corresponded with me over the years either via email or my social media sites, talks, or what have you.

The title of this post sounds like it would refer to a list of reference books for evacuation in the event of a zombie apocalypse. That could be a useful thing too! But that’s not what this particular thing is.

This particular thing is a snapshot of my bookshelf. Photos of each section of shelf, accompanied by an inventory list. To me, from my perspective, it’s very pared down. Over the years I have owned thousands of books. But my downsizing impulses, together with time and tide, have prompted me over the years to pare my personal library down to a lean core.

The other day the protagonist in one of my fiction stories (a novel that I have been writing for a long time and am getting ready to share with you later this spring) was making a bug-out list. Her list of books that she would simply have to carry with her even if she had to evac alone on foot. Her list is almost the same as mine, go figure. Unfortunately we would both have to be very selective, because books are heavy.

I love my bookshelf not just for the truth and beauty in the books it contains, but also for its visual appeal. The arrangements of books and a few little knickknacks. If I bugged out, I would have to leave it behind. To floods or fires or fascists or whatever destructive force was driving us to bug out. The sadness of that prospect (even though it’s probably a scenario in my head that comes from reading too many TEOTWAWKI novels) motivated me to at least sort of give my bookshelf a little chance to make a difference by sharing it online.

That gave me the idea to make a little booklet depicting my library visually and as a list. A sort of “these fragments I have shored against my ruins” kind of thing.

This is my indoor, personal library. Not the same as the Little Free Library that I have been stewarding in front of my home for almost 12 years now.

My library does not claim to be all-encompassing. Not even within the specialty fields represented. It doesn’t claim to have all the definitive tomes in each genre. Some of the books, like Skipping Christmas and Colgate’s Basic Sailing, were inherited rather than chosen by me. And yet they are every bit as much a reflection of what I’m about at the core.

(Weird that a person so prone to motion-sickness that she even gets seasick at the movies would have books on sailing, but the ocean is part of me and I love traveling it by armchair.)

There is a book, just one book, that I consider to be missing from this collection. I really need a copy of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, because that would be one of the books that would go in my bug out bag for sure. (How foolish I was to give my old copy away. Always thinking I could find another that had the same familiar cover.) Another for sure would be the very slim volume of TS Eliot’s poems.

List of books, left to right top to bottom.

By the way, I once heard that a child who grows up in a “bookish” household with 80 books or more, is much more likely to develop a lifetime love of learning.

Sadly, many households don’t even have one book, let alone five or 10. When I was growing up, we had multiple rooms that contained densely packed bookcases. I can’t say for sure but I estimate the number of books at roughly 500 to 1000. And that was in a military household where we had to move every couple of years! My parents were absolutely passionate about education, and they believed we learned as much in our travels and extracurricular reading as we learned in school. What was great for my siblings and me is that our parents were always learning with us.

My parents were fairly strict, and exercise close control over the most aspects of our daily life. My father would unapologetically refer to our family as a “benevolent dictatorship” (with his characteristic warm laugh).

But one area where they were extremely permissive was in our exposure to ideas via reading. That should tell you something. I think they realized that there was no idea in a book that could harm us kids as much as remaining in ignorance. Even though there were certain subjects that I didn’t necessarily feel free to voice out loud, my freedom to pursue them via reading was unassailed. I can remember at eight or nine years old bringing home a stack of seven or more books from the public library, and novels for adult audiences were always included in my selection. Obviously no librarian at that time (late 1960s, early 70s) felt like I would be harmed by exposure to these topics. They probably figured that either I would completely not understand, or I was old enough to handle it. It pretty much turned out they were right either way. Bonus, I also learned how to look up more information when I didn’t understand something. This should really tell us something as well.

We shouldn’t be so afraid of exposure to unfamiliar ideas and experiences. Either as kids, or as adults. What’s really scary is when some topic becomes a “no-fly zone,” not able to be discussed.

Again, this inventory of my bookcase isn’t anything that claims to be definitive. I’m not saying what books you need to read. This is more like a fingerprint of myself. A book-fingerprint, if you will. That said, I do consider the sustainability-related section to be a fairly nice little core library for that subject area.

The pine cones, old spools of thread, Maine souvenir pillow (from Acadia National Park ca. 1977!), old familiar board games, and other objects are absolutely interwoven with the content of my beloved books. It’s like a thematic collage of the core of my life, or main strands of it, or something.

As for literature, I make no bones about it. I am completely enamored of early 20th century British literature. I have read and loved many books from all over the world and love them as well. But at my core, I’m crazy about Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, and a few select other old friends.

When I traveled to England in the 1980s, a couple years after graduating from college, I felt like all of the books I loved had come to life. Later in life, via the popularization of DNA testing, I would come to find out that I had a lot more English and Scottish ancestry than I ever suspected. So I guess it’s hardly a surprise that I would be drawn to England, Scotland, and Wales, and feel quite at home there, despite my sort of loud and not very British personality.

(I do also have Eastern European heritage which I strongly love and identify with. But for some reason have not yet learned Slovak or any other Eastern European language, or read all that many books from Eastern Europe, other than the obvious Russian literature we were assigned in school.)

As for how I reconcile my awareness of the ravages of settler colonialism with my unrelenting love of its mother tongue, English, let’s just say language is a deep thing.

By the way, in college, those of us who got into 20th century literature were teased by our peers. They called the genre “Suicide Lit.” I mean, for sure, the stories got into some terrain that could be depressing, let’s say. But, for me, the bringing of these themes out into the open was more like “anti-suicide lit.” Help you know you are not alone in the world lit. Give you instant deep companionship lit. (The fact that I would never get to meet those companions in person did not make them any less close to my heart.)

What I love about literature, and reading in general, is how it allows us to transmit human knowledge and experience across space and time. Such a high density of information at quite low bandwidth.

What I love about reading and language is that it really is for everyone. What I hate is when people try to set up little fiefdoms of gatekeeping and elitism. Which unfortunately is all too common in the academic field known as literature.

I’m not going to lie, I probably never once wrote a very good paper about a book. I never was much good at dissecting stories. Rather, I was — and AM — just ever-hungry to take in experiences from around the world and throughout time.

But, of course, long before the printed word existed, oral storytelling traditions accomplished this feat of transmitting knowledge and experience with even lower bandwidth — and obviously a much lower ecological footprint, since no printing or shipping (or electrons and servers) was involved.

Who knows what my role might have been in a culture where writing did not exist. I am not going to lie, my memory for detail has never been great, so I might just have been sitting in the audience. Then again, up to this point in my life, I have mainly been a consumer of writing rather than a producer of books, articles, and other publications.

The great thing about writing is that we can do it at any age. We’re never too old to start. Fiction or nonfiction, the field is always wide open. Everyone: Your readers are always waiting. (I am writing this as much to encourage and remind myself, as to encourage and remind you.)

I read about 80 or 100 books a year. I don’t try to; it just happens. Ends up being about half and half between books related to my field (permaculture design/sustainability); and fiction.

And now here is the list of my bookshelf. I may write some notes next to some of the titles. Hope you enjoy the list and my photos. And thank you for reading this far!

(Stay tuned. I’m going to be making the list as I get around to it. In the meantime, enjoy the photos! This is like a lifetime time capsule or fingerprint of a lot of what constitutes my core.)

The #resistance takes many forms!!!

I really love having a house on a conspicuous corner lot along a high-traffic street in the tourist area. Lots of people walk by. This blackboard has been a fun thing. Sometimes I forget to keep up, but usually I write some message on it. Last week it said “welcome bikers have fun and stay safe.” Then it said “we are all in this world together” — with a heart. This week it says “welcome Spring Breakers, have fun and stay safe” — with a heart.

Got the chalkboard from a church on my street — they were cleaning / getting rid of surplus, and this chalkboard was in it, and they didn’t want it! I couldn’t believe it but I was happy to take it off their hands! It was originally colored green, but as weather wore down the green surface, I bought a little jar of black chalkboard paint and painted over it.

Also along with writing the messages I try to stay extra aware during event weeks, keep an eye on people walking by and if anyone looks confused or dehydrated offer them water. It’s just in a drinking glass, not bottled, so that’s kind of a novelty for people too ha ha

#501House #porousproperty

PS. A couple of things in response to people’s very kind words.

• Some of my ancestors gave me a job to do, and the resources to carry it out. I am very fortunate.
• One thing about kindness that seems to still be a too-well-kept secret is that kindness never just benefits the recipient, it benefits everyone including the person doing it. So it’s kind of a self interest thing too. <heart> Making a net of care, it’s like an umbrella that protects everyone. Our society did not devolve into a low-trust society overnight, and we won’t re-weave it back into a high-trust society overnight. But every one of us who are adding threads to the net, each in our own ways according to skills and resources, is steadily helping with the progress. Thank you everyone for helping in your unique ways!

And I have done plenty of very bad and unkind things in my life, and even though i have done my best to make amends, the memories of what I thought it was OK to say and do to fellow humans and other fellow beings are still extremely shocking and painful to me at times. And, amends will be an ongoing lifelong task. And, beyond that, there’s simply a lot of joy in adding love & care to the world instead of subtracting it.

Someone in Deep Adaptation posted this chart showing how much food a person has to grow to feed themselves for a year. It’s a very individualistic doomer prepper mentality. And regardless of whether the numbers are correct or not, it’s not doable by most people as individuals or even small family unit.

My take:

Hyper-individualism is anti-adaptive. I have been urging our mayor and other city officials to retool our landscape maintenance practices so that we are supporting pollinators and wildlife, and growing food for humans, instead of toxic manicured landscaping. Whether people listen remains to be seen, but I will keep bringing it up.

Also we need to support our local farmers in the immediately surrounding rural areas. Instead of driving to big box stores and buying food from 3000 miles away.

I also talk to church pastors, school principals and teachers, and of course fellow residents. In many parts of the world that are not the rich global north, large amounts of food are grown in cities, towns and villages.

On a personal note: Several fruit trees in our little yard are fruiting this year for the first time. Major milestone! And of course because Nature is generous, there will be plenty of fruit to share with neighbors. I also share education and seeds with neighbors. And show people how to make use of food when it’s in abundance and needs to be cooked and preserved.

This includes not only fresh fruit & vegs we grow, but also food that comes through the charitable church-run grocery distribution system. Sometimes there will suddenly be pounds and pounds of nuts for example, to the point where the people who receive the grocery bags are just leaving them along the road. I am a famous one for scooping them up and trying to share, find recipes, redistribute. It’s a wild task sometimes.

One year the neighborhood was like flooded with cans of green beans. And for a while there were just massive amounts of canned tomato sauce. And the canned salmon, there was so much of that it was crazy. And for a while they were bags and bags of walnuts. Whole walnuts, not even in the shells. In other words a super expensive thing and there would be 10 or 20 bags, two pounds each.

Speaking of surplus food in abundance, which I was a few posts down. Yesterday I found an entire 2-pound bag of whiting fillets! Had been frozen, still cold-cold, just in time to rescue and put in the fridge. And today cooked them up in the solar oven with butter and garlic and veggies and seasonings.

The donation food is meant for low-income families. They pass out a lot of bags of groceries at the church. Unfortunately a lot of the food can’t be used unless the person has a kitchen to cook it in.

Can’t open the cans unless you have a can opener, and what will you do with a large bag of frozen whiting fillets if you don’t have a house let alone a stove.

So some people end up leaving part of their grocery bags along the sidewalk. If it sounds like I am a veteran of sidewalk rescue food, I am! The bag of fillets was inside of a big paper bag that also contained a can of beans, a can of tomato sauce, a pack of pasta. And some rolls. All of which I will use.

I will now separate the beautifully solar-cooked buttery whiting & veggie mix into portions, and either share with people who want to eat it immediately or freeze for later.

(I did also save back a couple of uncooked fillets and chop them up and put them in a bowl w vinegar, am doing a ceviche experiment in the fridge. At least I hope it will turn out to be ceviche, that’ll be my first time trying to ceviche with whiting so wish me luck! If nothing else I can finish cooking it the regular way.)

It was cool, some nice people passed by on their way to go fishing just when I was opening the solar oven and taking out the successful experiment. Sometimes the successful ones go unwitnessed except by me ha ha, and the less successful ones are the ones that get witnessed by others.

They complimented me on my yard and we ended up chatting. It’s good to be able to show the solar oven in action.

Update: And I’m eating some of the solar-cooked fish & veggies right now for lunch, and it is absolutely delicious!

Update after eating lunch and portioning the rest into jars: It’s still early enough in the day, and sunny enough, that the oven temperature is 350!

I just now filled the empty pot with chopped dandelion greens and water, and put the pot back in the oven to boil. I love to boil greens and then add sauces/seasonings that I mix up. And I use the water from the boiled greens also. Sometimes I use it in soup and sometimes I just drink it like a tea.

And bonus (for my lazy self): By boiling the greens in the same pot that I just used to cook the fish, it will make it easier to clean the pot at the end, since there won’t be as much “butter and fish residue” left in the pot as there would have been if I had gone to wash the pot directly after cooking the fish.

BTW the dandelion greens are delicious, I buy them (and many other fruits and vegetables) from a local small biz who buys them from local farms. Win Win Win!!!

Photos here.

What a difference seven years makes! When I moved into my house in March 2018, the picture on the left is what the yard looked like.

Since then it has been transformed into an oasis of fruit trees, perennial greens, places for the public to sit, solar & rainwater education, stormwater absorption, relief from the heat, housing for various friends over the years, arts & crafts, mental & spiritual wellness, community library, dune wildflower seed-bank, and much more.

The 501 house, my ultimate dream palace and work studio, is more popularly known as “jenny’s corner,” a title I got from Ms Anne Ruby and Mr Steve Miller’s name for the little environmental segment I sometimes share at the BNW and MNW neighborhood meetings.

Getting a variety of trees and other plants to grow in this yard involved a lot of hard work, experimentation, failure.

Many of the techniques I used, especially at the beginning, to get anything established on the chemical-treated, erosion-prone soil were learned from fellow permaculturists who worked in the Jordanian desert, Canary Islands, Arizona desert, and other extremely harsh climates.

Physical deserts — and social deserts — can often be rehydrated, with love and patience and the right tools and mentors. Deep grief can also provide fuel and inspiration.

Praise God/dess and Ancestors!!!